26 Jan 2015

Finding Time

Today is the second relaunching of my blog. I’ve been meaning to start writing more, both as a practice to get better at writing and to force myself to become a better communicator, so without further ado.

Finding Time in a Busy World to Learn

While listening to a recent Ruby Rogues episode, I had some initial negative reactions. In the episode, the rogues and guest John Sonmez talked about spending time marketing yourself as a software developer. And at one point they talk about find the time to do it. They had a couple of suggestions for how to do it.

My first reaction: do none of these people have kids? I know that several of them do and Avdi has quite the little herd of Grimms. Then I felt guilty. Why do I feel the burnout with only 2 kids and their after school activities? I don’t really watch much TV anymore except for the occasional hockey or baseball game. My wife and I do enjoy a couple shows on Netflix, but we struggle to find time to even watch those. I have a growing “stack” (can you stack Ebooks?) of technical books that I really want to read. And I should really be blogging or committing to open source. I already feel tired from not enough sleep. Ahhh … the guilt.

In the past I’ve tried to be very involved in the local Pittsburgh ruby community, and I even wrote about it. I was an organizer for all three Steel City Ruby conferences and I volunteered to do video recording/editing for the Pittsburgh Ruby Meetup. But I’ve been pulling back from the community to combat a growing sense of burnout. I told the organizing committee that I wasn’t going to be helping for the 2015 conference, although the committee ended up taking the year off anyway. I missed four months of the meetup’s meetings. I missed my friends from the community. My kids, and their activities, and my volunteering (non tech related) have kept me so busy the past six months that I’ve not done anything to market myself as a software developer.

Time to Start Again

This blog is my first attempt to start again. As Jessica put it, I need to “bring the pipes together” and accomplish more in the same time, by marketing the things that I will do. Learning Clojure, which we also use at LivingSocial, and reading tech books are things that I can write about. I need to get over the guilt and imposter syndrome that keeps me down and keeps me from writing.

So a plan:

One thing I hope to write about, is my attempt to implement the game of Monopoly. Raganwald wrote about it and I think it’s a great way for me to explore OO design and hopefully compare it to a Clojure implementation as I learn.

Those of you that know me, please encourage me to follow up. You, the community, have been such a blessing to me and my career. Maybe my ramblings on a blog somewhere will help me give back.